AR development report
In this group project, we initially aimed to develop the main purpose for this project is to create AR assets to relieve users’ mental stress. We decided to go with the path of nature as the topic. Our beliefs that nature contains stress-relieving effects on mental health are both based on some of our experiences and research papers.
1. After a series of discussions about interactions and some feedback, we ditched the idea of destroying plants in order to reach emotional catharsis and chose the interaction idea of plant growth. In order to achieve this, we chose Unity as the main platform to create AR assets, each of us has different ideas. I prefer the idea of plant grows where hands touch. And so, for my initial test, I used the VFX effect to simulate vine-growing animation which was generated from visual coding.
2 The animation is developed based on a foundation package so that the animation can be triggered by VR toggles.
3. There are two methods I found to create interactions between the user's hands and digital assets, the hands visualiser prefab in the XR hands package.
3. And all-in-one SDK that possesses ready-made scripts for hand interactions, including hand tracking, interaction with virtual objects as well as hand gesture tracking.
As time progressed, I came across L-system principles in coding that simulate the growth of plants. On one hand, the art style of plants was settled to be realistic. I decided to test out whether trees’ growth animations can be achieved by the L-system. The code functioned unfunctionally, it generated different types of plants and their unique animation. However, I did not find a way to render them into meshes and make them into 3d. So I stopped dwell on it.
I stopped working on the vine growing animation VFX effect, each of our work of plant asset holds a different art style. When putting our work together, leads to aesthetic disconformity.
AR portals
I happened to find out the effect of entering to virtual world via the AR portal. The visual effect was mainly achieved by using occlusion shader code to set up virtual walls that hide virtual objects placed behind. Inspired by the effect, I conceived an idea of a new interaction, that is to allow users to choose to enter into nature whether it is in different seasons, or of different landscapes. This can be accomplished by the terrain tool in Unity, especially in building up realistic landscapes. After that, birds chipping, rain, or other white noise as the environment background sounds allows users to calm down.
I once succeeded achieved the effect but the area of walking passthrough was cramped, I tried to make the portal corridor wider. To obstacle the XR work approaching VR. However, it seems that the change of portal volume dysfunction the walking passthrough effect.
This is not yet completed.
Contribution to group work
Research and reference
To begin with, it is important to know the types of mushrooms and how people can possibly interact with them. Besides eating, picking mushrooms can be seen as a conventional way to interact with them and some of the places in Southeast Asia developed traditional activities in their culture.
One interesting interaction I found out was, that there is a special property of a kind of mushroom, called puffball mushroom that acquires ‘hitting’ force from nature in order to spread its spore. Its spore is hidden inside the mushroom cap and the export of the spore is located at the top of the cap. When the puffball mushroom is matured, the spore is easily spread by the force of nature such as rainfalls, winds, and stumps from wild animals. This feature also attracts many travellers or hikers to step on it, which provides a sense of satisfaction.
Here are video links for stepping on puffball mushrooms, check if you have a sense of satisfaction that is similar to popping bubble wraps.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VRtg-tONlac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPkfEfxzs68
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MXejq77Evuc https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VngUz8_lFsY
playtest
As I did not work out the portal assets in time, I thus designed simple graspable objects for the group. As we focus too much on plant animation and growing interaction which types of plants often come into mind when come across the idea of the word" “plant”. Mushrooms seem to be the most suitable object to be picked.
I first used Maya to build out a puffball mushroom shape and edit its texture by using Photoshop according to the reference images and video. After that, I edited the object UV for texturing. After that, I then moved to create a normal mushroom with saturated colours.
On the whole, I created four kinds of mushrooms, with the same method. After that, they were imported into Unity, for so far they are designed to be grabbed, when mushrooms are picked, a pop sound effect is triggered.
To make the interaction visually appealing, I add particle effects based on the Particle system that represents spores, and the effect can last for a time while the mushroom is held in hand or by toggle.
Before that, it is important to set up hands, the prefab of hands can be downloaded from hand package management, then attached handvisualiser scripts into the XR origin prefab to locate the user's hands, and match the function of the controller as parameters in the hand visualiser script component. Then adding physics on mushrooms, colliders, rigid body and interactable script from the ARfoundation package, these components allow mushrooms to be picked and dropped by hand.
Relection
Through this project, I have experienced many growing pains both from facing enigmas at the technical level of applying software, and the sense of loss of role to play in group collaboration. Our starting point was focusing on the possible assistance of VR and AR in mental health. As we both have different paces and ways of working, I was not completely comfortable making a hasty decision without discussion and background based on our goals but persuasions from intuition impacted by social ideology. I was keen to find out about the topic of mental health and the effect of XR as a medium on it to gain a basic understanding of the topic so that can assist in conceiving more ideas of therapy treatment on deciding which path we are going in-depth, on the other hand, this could be a distraction from the assessment that slows down the progress of making projects and reduce time in learning software or coding. As the topic of VR's impacts on mental health is controversial, the key depends on the aim of application, if it is used for therapy purposes, it is more likely to help or vice versa if it is used for entertainment. However, the outcome of the project was unexpectedly functional in stress relieving.
One of the most challenging parts also was gradually becoming the ultimate goal for the project- making plant-growing animation and triggering it by hand. Personally, I was interested in achieving hands interaction, unfortunately, as I am a complete beginner in programming. Despite this, I attempted to animate trees by using L sys. At last, these were all solved by my colleagues but, it left me with a sense of loss to the project. Therefore, this can be the reason and the result of multiple attempts to make different unfinished assets.